On International Co-Dependency

Darlings, Pretty Lady doesn't usually read this sort of thing, because it engenders a sense of helplessness and despair, but she did today. And now, difficult as it is, she encourages you to read it, too.

The day before yesterday was catastrophic. The day began with news of the killings in Jihad Quarter. According to people who live there, black-clad militiamen drove in mid-morning and opened fire on people in the streets and even in houses. They began pulling people off the street and checking their ID cards to see if they had Sunni names or Shia names and then the Sunnis were driven away and killed. Some were executed right there in the area. The media is playing it down and claiming 37 dead but the people in the area say the number is nearer 60.

The horrific thing about the killings is that the area had been cut off for nearly two weeks by Ministry of Interior security forces and Americans. Last week, a car bomb was set off in front of a 'Sunni' mosque people in the area visit. The night before the massacre, a car bomb exploded in front of a Shia husseiniya in the same area. The next day was full of screaming and shooting and death for the people in the area. No one is quite sure why the Americans and the Ministry of Interior didn't respond immediately. They just sat by, on the outskirts of the area, and let the massacre happen.

Sadly, this is not a terribly surprising outcome, given our nation's well-intentioned but hopelessly naive attempt to bring peace, stability and democracy to a 'nation' with no intrinsic understanding of these concepts. Problems can generally not be 'fixed' from the outside in. This is true of individuals, and it is true of nations.

Someone very close to Pretty Lady recently noted that nearly every nation goes through a historical period marked by genocide. The United States is no exception. This person remarked that even if enlightened aliens from outer space had arrived and forcibly prevented the Americans of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from massacring the Indians, they would simply have waited until the aliens' backs were turned, and stepped up the importation of smallpox blankets. Elimination of the 'other' appears to be an ineradicable symptom of human adolescence.

Pretty Lady knows, from empirical, personal experience, that when another person is behaving insanely, he cannot be reasoned out of his behavior. You cannot go in and tell him, "Look, you're making yourself miserable; if you'd just stop doing this, you'd be happy." You cannot love him out of it by allowing him to abuse you, either. As painful as it is to sit back and watch, you have to let him experience the consequences of his actions. The best that can be done is damage control; getting young children out of his vicinity, for example.

If a person finally comes to the realization that he is making himself, and everyone around him, miserable, you can then be of some moderate assistance by supporting him in his decision to help himself. You can provide a listening ear, the occasional bit of practical advice, the discretionary economic boost. But he has to do the work himself.

Pretty Lady offers no solutions for the current state of world affairs. She merely offers the observation that attempting to solve a problem often makes matters infinitely worse. The best, and only, solution she has ever found is to let go, and let the Holy Spirit sort it out.